Americans Say ‘Okay, Whatever’ to Permitting Reform

Most Americans support the idea of a bipartisan law that would make it easier to build new clean energy projects while benefiting some oil and gas development, according to a Heatmap News poll conducted earlier this month.

Some 52% of Americans said they backed the general idea of the legislation, the poll found. About a quarter of Americans opposed it, and roughly another quarter said they weren’t sure.

That’s good news for one of the last remaining pieces of environmental policy that Congress could pass under this presidency: a bipartisan proposal from Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that would speed up the process of building climate-friendly infrastructure in exchange for concessions to the oil and gas industry.

The legislation is meant to bind together Democratic and Republican goals for the country’s energy development. Democrats in Congress and the White House are worried that permitting delays and excessive red tape could now slow down America’s shift away from fossil fuels. This year, for instance, the United States will add less new wind capacity than it has in any year since 2020. Experts say that’s due in large part to the lack of new power lines to parts of the country where wind is abundant. Even many progressives, who have historically championed stricter permitting and environmental review laws, now favor altering them in the abstract to speed the zero-carbon buildout — although prominent groups have opposed this particular deal.

Republicans, meanwhile, have accused the Biden administration of dragging its feet on making federally owned lands available for oil and gas development. The Biden administration leased 95% fewer acres in 2023 than the Trump administration did in 2019, according to E&E News.

Under President Biden, the Interior Department has acknowledged that oil and gas drilling on public lands worsens climate change, but said that information alone does not allow it to block new leases. From 2005 to 2019, roughly one quarter of all fossil fuel extraction in the United States happened on federal land.

Beyond those facts, however, having a national conversation about permitting reform is tricky because so many proposals are so deep in the weeds that their importance often isn’t immediately obvious. How many voters are ready to debate whether the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should be able to fast-track certain new power lines? Or why there should be a statute of limitations for some National Environmental Policy Act lawsuits? (If you’re curious, I wrote a cheat sheet on some of the biggest permitting reform proposals last year.)

Indeed, many of the people Heatmap polled told us they didn’t know enough to decide whether they were for or against the bill — but those who did feel confident answering largely said they were in favor of it. Across cities and suburbs, political parties and age groups, permitting reform is about 15 to 25 points above water. Republicans are somewhat more amenable to the compromise than Democrats: 58% of GOP voters support the proposal, while only 47% of Democrats do. Independents are most skeptical at 44%, though the idea of the deal still has more independent supporters than opponents.

The idea of a deal commands majority support in every region of the country. It’s also supported by most Americans who say they live in rural areas, small towns, suburbs, and small cities. (Among Americans who live in large cities, the measure commands 48% support.) Even Americans who say they would oppose some forms of energy development in their area — such as a hydrogen project or battery storage plant — back the proposal.

This all suggests that the permitting reform deal could remain largely depoliticized as Congress continues to debate it through the fall — if you were to summarize respondents’ reactions to the survey, it might look like, “Sure, whatever, sounds good.” The public’s apparent openness to a deal also comes as its concern for urgent action on climate change has somewhat cooled since 2020.

Over the past few years, too, polls have detected a substantive drop in Republican support for clean energy development. While 54% of conservative Republicans backed clean energy in 2018 according to a Yale poll, that figure has since fallen to 24%. Building more clean energy does not even command a majority of liberal and moderate Republican support anymore, Anthony Leiserowitz, a Yale professor of climate change communication, told me.

A separate poll — from the Pew Research Center — found that Republican support for building more wind and solar farms has fallen by 20 percentage points since President Joe Biden took office, although it also showed that both energy sources commanded majority support.

“Clean energy used to be one of those things that pretty much everyone supported more or less,” Leiserowitz said. “That is important. That is the backdrop to the deeper currents behind the increasing opposition to wind farms and solar farms across the country.”

“Clean energy,” he added, “has become much more politicized than it was in the past.”

The Heatmap poll of 5,202 American adults was conducted by Embold Research via online responses from August 3 to 16, 2024. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.